A-packing we will go... and a game night was had!

Well, the holidays are over, and with them also ends my respite from organizing and packing everything I own in preparation for clearing out and fixing up the house. I've packed for moving six times before in my life, and it never seems to get any easier. The adage of "the amount of stuff you own will expand exponentially to fit the space you have" still holds true.

On the flip-side of that, the soon-to-be-ex and I sat down and had a talk last weekend. It's the first time we've talked since before New Year's when she packed up a large suitcase and left, telling me she was "going to go stay with her parents for a while and maybe go on a little trip." Turns out that on this "little trip" she went to Seattle to "visit family out there" (and hook up with a guy she had met online.) She didn't really tell me that last part but it was pretty easy to infer, as during the talk she told me she had now found someone else and was going to be working towards saving enough money to move. Nothing like dumping all your responsibilities and going off on a whim, eh? Well, if she's happy then I say more power to her. I'm not holding a grudge in this thing, I just want it to be over and done with. I've officially had the papers signed and notarized and her lawyer should have them by now. It's all over but the filing, and I fully expect that after she has enough cash scraped together to pay the startup costs of moving to Seattle then she'll be out the door with not so much as a "good-bye". It's funny how when we first got married I said we should stick with renting a place for a while so we could be more mobile if something better presented itself job-wise... she objected and wanted to buy a house near her family... I gave in to her whims... and now she's the one who is essentially ready to skip town.

Irony, you're a cruel bitch...

On the downside of this, all the packing means that I'm going to have to seriously curtail my gaming. Now granted, I'm not going to go completely Nucking Futz and pack up everything under the sun - the computer is going to stay hooked up until they pry my cable-modem out of my hands. But there's no way in hell I'm going to be able to balance work, packing, and gaming during the next two months or so. I'm going to be putting in a LOT of long hours with a tape-gun and boxes...

Ok, enough boring crap about my personal life - on to gaming news! This past Friday I got invited to join in on a gaming night with a bunch of friends from work. Apparently one of the managers has a large finished basement and every couple months he throws a geek-out night where his wife goes out with her friends and he has a LAN-Party in the spare room. We got six people going on the LAN at the same time (BYOC, of course) and had a blast playing Starcraft for several hours. We tried Rise of Nations a couple times just to change it up but as the games of that took almost double the time of the Starcraft rounds we hung it up pretty quick. There wasn't much FPS action going on, which suited me just fine. Apparently in the last couple years I have developed a problem with FPS games and can no longer play them, as after about ten minutes or so I start getting motion-sick. That really sucks! I used to love playing UT and Half-Life multiplayer, but those days are gone, my friends. Fortunately I have no problems at all with RTS games (aside from getting repeatedly PWNED as I haven't touched Starcraft in about six years!) A good time was had by all, and we're hoping to do it again in the future.

Tech Out